Colonel Gustavo Baz and Francisco A. Cuenca were the director and deputy director, respectively, of the School of Aviation when Emilio enrolled. Among his classmates were many who would later become prominent in the history of Mexican aviation: Luis Boyer, Antonio Cárdenas Rodríguez, Alfonso Corona del Rosal, Antonio Nava Castillo, Melchor Sánchez Cárdenas, Enrique Kanter, David Chagoya, Arturo Jiménez Nieto, Rodolfo Torres Rico, Rafael J. Suárez, José Betancourt, Othon Hernandez Amaral, Juan Carmona, Bernardo H. Hermosillo, Ignacio Valle, Eduardo F. Serrano, Gonzalo Acosta, Antonio Lojero, Raúl Mateos Aguilera, Oscar Aarana Sanz, Martín R. Taguma, Fructuoso Perez, Feliciano Flores, and many others.

While at the school of aviation, Emilio stood out for his amazing memory. One of the bimonthly exams in Aerodynamics asked for six of the one hundred and twenty values from a table of barometric pressure, relative pressure, and relative temperature at different altitudes. In his answer sheet, Emilio wrote down all one hundred and twenty values without a single mistake. This raised suspicion on behalf of the faculty that Emilio had cheated on his exam. The faculty members located Emilio playing basketball and informed him of their suspicion. Emilio promptly invited the faculty members to a nearby empty classroom where he replicated the entire table on the blackboard from memory and without errors. He was immediately awarded a Outstanding grade on the exam.

Emilio advanced quickly through the theoretical portion of his training and demonstrated enormous practical flying skills even at the early age of 19. He completed his studies and earned the title of "Pilot of Aviation" on January 14th, 1926 after completing his flight test on a Mexican built Avro biplane.